(Re)considering Nature of Science Education in the Face of Socio-scientific Challenges and Injustices

Abstract

Throughout the past decades, challenges of socio-scientific nature such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate degradation and scientific racism have brought many relevant and pressing questions to the fore of the science education field, prompting science educators into (re)thinking the purposes and roles of science education within a landscape where the links between science and socio-political challenges, injustices, citizenship and democracy have become increasingly complex. In this theoretical paper, I seek to examine what Critical Pedagogies and Decolonial Studies can bring to science education in the face of these challenges and injustices of socio-scientific nature, with a focus on the area of Nature of Science (NOS). In particular, drawing on scholarship from across these fields and on some illustrative examples from common science education topics, I seek to propose ways in which an approach to NOS grounded on a critical-decolonial perspective may be used to support the learning of school students and science teachers’ own professional learning around science’s entanglements with social justice and socio-political issues.